Touching the Wire (31 page)

‘Charlotte, you know how much
he wants children. You can’t deny him that… if it is his. He has a right to be
told.’ Lucy only called her Charlotte when she was angry with her.

‘But not yet. It’ll only
complicate the divorce. I was going to end it with Adam, but I don’t want to
lose him, Luce, especially not now, if the baby’s his. Suppose he can’t forgive
me.’

‘You have to be honest.
You’re playing with people’s lives again. What are you proposing to do? Go into
a nunnery, have a secret pregnancy, and then do a DNA test before telling the
lucky winner? Get real.’

‘I want my baby to have a
father. I want it to be Adam. What am I going to do?’

‘
Auribus teneo lupum.
Secrets
come back to haunt you. You’ll have to let go of the wolf one day and, when you
do, the effect could be catastrophic, not least for your child. You’re going to
have to come clean. Tell them
both
. The sooner the better.’

‘You’re right… of course you
are, but let me do it in my own time. I haven’t got used to the idea myself
yet.’

‘I’ll support you, whatever
you do, Charlotte. You know that, but remember that wolf.’

***

Charlotte picked up the phone. It was Adam.
Talk about anything but clinics. ‘How’s life at Duxford?’

‘I’ve been trying to ring
you all day, Charlotte. Are you okay? What did the clinic say?’

So much for hoping he’d
forgotten. ‘They need to do more tests.’

‘But they didn’t find
anything serious?’ His voice was anxious.

‘No.’                                                                                       

‘Thank God. I love you,
Charlotte. I’ll be there for you, whatever the result.’

‘I love you too.’

‘I wish I was with you now.’

She couldn’t speak for
tears.

‘Charlotte?’

‘I do love you, Adam.’

She replaced the receiver,
her breath ragged, and sank onto the sofa.

‘I should have finished with
him, Grandpa, not kept him dangling.’

You should have told him
about the baby
.
It could be his.

She palmed away tears. ‘It
could be, so why risk our future by ending it, or telling him it could be
Robin’s?’

Can you live with the
consequences of keeping silent? It isn’t only you who’ll suffer them.

‘It’s easy for Lucy to give
advice… she’s got a loving husband and five wonderful children. She isn’t the
one throwing away the best thing that’s ever happened to her.’ She tried to justify
the decision she’d almost made. Her flesh had betrayed Adam, weak flesh seduced
by Robin’s need. ‘In my heart I’ve never stopped loving Adam, Grandpa. What
will we gain if I confess?’

It will eat away at you,
Charlotte. Do the right thing. Auribus teneo lupum.

The wolf lurked in the
shadows, waiting to break both their hearts.

Wolf, wolf, wolf… On
impulse, she typed Wselfwulf into her laptop.
Wselfwulf: Anglo-Saxon.
Gender: male, Wolf of Slaughter.
She clicked on a website. It had a list of
wolf names with origins in every language and culture. To distract herself she
clicked and scrolled. 

Botwolf: Old English,
Herald Wolf. Adolph: German and Polish. Gender: male,
Noble Wolf
? She snorted in derision and scrolled
further.
Lowell: Old French, Wolf-cub
… If only.
Wolfgang: German,
Teutonic. Gender: male, Son of the wolf, path of the wolf.
At least Hans
Wolfgang Schmitt was aptly named, following blindly in the footsteps of Mengele
and Hitler. She found no myths or legends about Grandpa’s wolf, no woodcutters
or princes, nor any mention of Günsburg. Why had he chosen that name? Wolf of
Slaughter… What more had he been trying to tell her? The answer, she was
certain, lay in one place and one place only. She punched in Adam’s number:
whatever happened between them this was his mystery, too, and he had a
professional interest. He answered instantly.

‘Adam, I’m going to
Auschwitz as soon as I can get a flight.’

‘Please don’t go alone,
Charlotte.’

‘I’ll be alright. You can’t take
time from your new job. You’ve only just started.’

‘I thought you wanted to
hand over copies of the documents.’

She hadn’t thought that far
ahead. ‘I did.’

‘Then I can come with you in
an official capacity… bring them with me. I’ll need to explain the IWM’s
involvement with the originals so you remain anonymous.’

She’d forgotten the need to
protect her family from media attention. What would she do without Adam? She
put a hand on her stomach. It could be Robin’s child.

Adam spoke in her ear. ‘I’ll
clear it with my boss. Book flights for two, for tomorrow if you can. I’ve just
had the translation back.’

The translation: she’d
forgotten about that too. And she hadn’t shown Lucy the diary: pregnancy had
addled her brain.

Dust blew across the single set of tracks that
led arrow-straight to Death Gate. Charlotte huddled against Adam in a desolate
landscape, more for comfort than warmth. Wselfwulf howled along the wind and
the endless stretch of barbed wire. If there was a place for his lair, this was
it.

Why had she come? Grandpa’s
nightmare was here. She wanted to add her voice to those who stood against the
holocaust deniers the only way she knew, by bringing copies of the terrible
documents home to Auschwitz and the Birkenau Extermination camps.

As if on a shared impulse,
they walked towards the gate. Despair thickened the air, eyes watched from the
guard tower above the central gateway, and hope ebbed from her heart as it must
have ebbed from Miriam and Grandpa’s. Wselfwulf: the Wolf of
Slaughter…                                              

The camp was vast and, away
from the main guardhouse, seemed almost neglected, the summer growth maturing
to seed heads and yellowing foliage. Charlotte scanned low wooden buildings and,
behind them, rows and rows of concrete slab foundations and chimneys.

The track branched: lines
led off into the distance to some unknown hell. She paused at the side of the
rails on a strip of ground the guide book called The Ramp and let the group of
visitors drift away. She wanted only Adam by her side: he understood.

She waved the guide book.
‘These are just words, Adam. Grandpa’s dead are here… Miriam’s dead. He loved
her. I need them to live again if they’re to tell their stories. I owe them that.’
She took out the diary. ‘This is the real thing, written as it happened. Open
the envelope.’

 Adams slid the
translated pages from the envelope and handed them to her.

‘Would you read them?’

He cleared his throat.
‘Roger says the language is Hungarian. The first entry says,
I love you…
szeretlek.’ He paused and then began reading. ‘
This is one family’s story.
It is to bear witness as Chuck asked me. He fears we may not survive.
’

‘Chuck? Albert said he knew
Grandpa as Chuck.’

‘
We live near Budapest, in
a village surrounded by wooded hills. German soldiers come in the night and my
Benedek is shot protecting us. The Nazis hang his body from a tree, along with
the bodies of young women and children executed for the crime of being a Jew.
We are forced into ghettos. From the ghettos we are marched to the railway
station with what possessions we can carry. There we are crammed into a cattle
wagon, one of perhaps sixty. The doors are barred from the outside. We are
tired. The children cry and we comfort them. There is no room to sit. There is
no food or water, no sanitation, no air to breathe. Grandfather dies on the
way. Grandmother is inconsolable. We stop time and again, sometimes for hours,
sometimes all night, but no-one comes to see if we live. We can no longer stand
so we lean against one another, or sit on top of the dead. It is four days now,
and the children have stopped crying.
’

The wind carried a million
moans of grief and fear across the desolate land.

She took up where Adam had
left off. ‘
We arrive at last. When the doors are flung back it is morning.
The sun hurts our eyes. A sign says Auschwitz. We do not know where this is.
’
She shook her head. ‘They had no idea what was going to happen to them.’

Adam read over her shoulder.
‘
We carry out our dead and our belongings and lay them on the ground. SS
officers separate us and the men are marched away
.
Grandfather’s body is
thrown in a heap with others. A group of men in dirty striped coats collect our
luggage. Mother and I pass emaciated people, penned behind barbed-wire fences
like animals. When we stop we are separated again, some to the left and some to
the right. They say we will be reunited. Grandmother takes Mary. I don’t know
that Chuck saves my life. He cannot save Grandmother and my baby daughter. They
are sent to the left with my sister and her children. We don’t know where
Father is.
’

Had Grandpa or Miriam stood
here, on this very spot? She stirred the grey dust with a foot and a small
whirlwind carried it away. Adam stared along the tracks as if seeing the
frightened huddle of the dispossessed. He removed the paper clip from the
sheets of paper and one fluttered to the ground, took off again and cavorted on
the wind. She dashed after it, desperate to save Miriam’s words. It evaded her
grasp and flapped across the ground like a wounded bird. She trapped it with
her foot and plucked it from the ground.

Her footprint on the paper
accused her: Miriam, and millions like her, suffered under the cruel stamp of a
Nazi jackboot.
Listen… listen… see what they do…
‘I’m sorry, Miriam.’

Adam’s hand on her shoulder
startled her. ‘My fault. I should have made sure I had a good grip on them
all.’

She handed him the sheet of
paper wordlessly.

He squeezed her shoulder and
then carefully dusted the paper before he continued reading. ‘
All our
belongings, our personal possessions, even our clothes are taken from us. We
are shaved of all body hair and made to shower. We stand naked for hours. They
give us filthy rags to wear, and shoes that don’t fit, but no underclothes.
Numbers are tattooed onto our forearms.
’

‘They treated them like
cattle.’

‘Worse than cattle. They’d
have fed cattle. Listen.’

Listen…

‘We have had nothing to
eat or drink for four days. We do not yet know that everyone we love has been
gassed. They tell us the chimneys are bake houses. Bake houses must mean there
is food. We ask for water and are told there is none.’

‘She lost her baby… almost
her whole family.’ She couldn’t imagine never seeing Mum, or Gran, or Lucy and
the children again, to be alone. She didn’t know how to tell him about her
baby. 

Adam’s breath was warm on
her neck. ‘
Later, we are given a ration of hard grey bread with a square of
margarine. Bowls of thin liquid are passed round. They call it soup but I see
no vegetables or meat in it. It smells of rotten cabbage or turnip. Mother and
I each take two mouthfuls before our bowls are snatched by the next person.
There are complaints that the Blockälteste and her favoured friends have
scooped their share from the bottom of the vat leaving us only liquid.
’

‘How can people treat other
people this way?’ She moved away from Adam, the death-scape blurring.

‘It’s called survival.’ He
swept a hand at the scene before them. ‘Are you sure you want to see this?’

‘Grandpa couldn’t leave,
could he? Miriam and her family couldn’t leave.’ She followed a well-trodden
path towards low wooden buildings. Bunks were jammed in wherever they would
fit, dozens of them, three high, with room for three people to sleep side by
side. Numbers could be seen on the ends of the bunks; initials and names were
carved in wood worn smooth by countless hands. On roof beams were painted
orders in German.

Adam translated as they trod
in the footsteps of the dead. ‘
Hats off in the block. Cleanliness is health
.’

Her fingers traced the
carved initials. The walls were covered with line drawings, names and dates: a
desperate people, reduced to numbers and clinging to their humanity. Jammed in
like that disease would be rife, and disease wouldn’t be tolerated.

He reached for her hand. ‘Do
you want me to go on?’

‘No, but we have to read
it.’

‘
Night comes at last and
we are grateful to lie down. Bunks, three tiers high run down both sides of a
long wooden building with high windows. There are rows and rows of such buildings
as far as the eye can see. We are ten to a bunk…’

‘Ten… ’

‘We are ten to a bunk,
lying so close, head to toe, that if one moves all must move. We have no
mattress and only one blanket to a bunk, and must sleep with our clothes and
shoes for fear of theft. Feet stick in my face, and elbows in my stomach. I am
so exhausted that I sleep anyway. In the morning we are given only black
coffee. Some of the women have saved bread for breakfast. The sight of it makes
our stomachs cramp. One woman had hers stolen as she slept. We are glad we ate
ours.
’

He turned a page. ‘
We
trip over one another in our rush for Zählappell, and then spend hours more
standing outside the hut while we wait to be counted.
’
They left the
cramped claustrophobia of the barrack and breathed fresh air. ‘
A pall of
smoke hangs over the camp and the smell is sickening. We know it can’t be bread
baking. Ilse has been here a month. She comes from a village not far from my
own, and is wise in the ways of the camp. She tells me to stand next to her,
and Mother stands next to me. We are to be friends. She has traded her bread
ration for a shoe that fits and is trying to trade for another. Shoes that fit
are more important than bread. If we cannot work because of raw feet we are
uneconomical to feed and will be picked at the next selection.’
Adam’s
voice sounded hoarse.

‘Here, let me.’ She took the
sheets of paper from him. The breeze fluttered at their edges as if trying to
cleanse the pages of horror. Was this where Miriam and her mother stood, waiting
to be counted? ‘
We are marched to the latrines in groups of fifty at set
times. One latrine to serve many thousands, rows of holes where we must sit
together and only two faucets where we wash together, everywhere filthy with
mud and excrement. Most of us have diarrhoea. Mother cannot wait and soils
herself. She is mortified and in tears but no-one takes notice. She is not the
only one. Behind the latrines is where we meet to trade goods. The guards
appear not to see. It is how the camp functions. Shoes for bread, bread for
needles, buttons for shoes. Any of us would trade a diamond ring for a piece of
bread. They say our jewellery is sent back to Germany. I wonder who will wear
my wedding ring. I have a bad cold. I trade my bread ration for a piece of cotton
to wipe my nose.
’

‘You don’t think of the
small things that make life tolerable.’

‘We take such a lot for
granted, Adam.’ She scanned the next entry before reading it. ‘
Lice torment
us. Lice carry typhus. They disinfect us, making us stand naked for hours while
they bake our clothes and gas the barracks, but the lice are back within days.
I find buttons in the soup. I try not to think of how they got there. I will
trade some for needles. It is raining. The mud makes every movement difficult.
We are to keep the barracks clean yet we have no water except for rainwater we
collect in leaky bowls. We must appear clean ourselves or risk looking unwell.
We wash at the faucets, holding our clothes between our legs to stop them being
stolen, and use our dresses to dry ourselves. Some are so thirsty they drink
the washing water even though they know it makes them ill. The soup is as
rancid as the soap, and I think they try to poison us. We drink it anyway.
’

Adam pointed. ‘There’s
another mention of Chuck.
I antagonised one of the guards by not having the
right expression on my face. He kicked me to the ground. I vomited, and for
that I am made to kneel in the rain for a day and a night without food. I am
watched all night from a guard tower. I dare not move. Later, when I am ill
from exhaustion and exposure, and taken to the infirmary, a doctor tends me
with care. He asks me to help him, as he has heard I am a nurse. It is Chuck,
who saved my life on arrival at the camp. The rations are better and infirmary nurses
are not selected for the gas chambers. God is good. Chuck and I work with
pitiful supplies. He shows me the photographs of my family, which he saved from
Grandmother’s case. I thought I had no tears left. He keeps them safe for me
and trust in each other grows. Chuck asks me to write in his diary. I feel
blessed.
’ Adam stopped, eyebrows raised. ‘Blessed? She must have been a
remarkable woman.’

‘Let me see that.’ She read
the entry herself. ‘These photographs… they must be the ones Grandpa put in the
carving. My God, listen to this.
Today Chuck smothered Darja’s newborn baby.
I don’t understand and am angry. He says mothers who give birth are thrown live
into the ovens with their babies. He has buried the child. No-one but me knows
it ever lived. God deliver us from this hell. New prisoners arrive and we stare
at them as they stare at us. They look almost fat to us. Are we now the penned
and emaciated animals?
’

The next entry was sparse.
Adam sounded drained. ‘
Darja touched the wire
.’

Tears ran down her cheeks.
Darja had died of a broken heart: the loss of her child, possibly her last link
to the man she’d loved, had pushed her beyond despair. Grandpa’s long silences
and distant stares had been filled with pain and helpless guilt at this
inhumanity, and he had told no-one, forced to hide vital evidence of these
atrocities to protect Gran from Nazi sympathisers. She read through her tears.
‘
I went with Mother to the showers. We were beaten all the
way. Someone stole Mother’s shoes. I will try to find a pair that fit her.
Someone will die tonight and they won’t need them anymore.
’